This morning, Siena opened the car trip saying, “I want to listen to that thing we listened to before Free to Be You and Me yesterday. It was jamming.” After we listened to that first song, she said she wanted another jamming song, so I decided to make her listen to an old favorite (from a group that used to be a passion) of mine. She was enjoying it, but she saw our exit off the highway approaching and she really wanted a third song. I stopped that second one half way through because she wanted “the one where you can call me Al.”

So Siena’s playlist this morning was…drum roll please…

• “Hurricane Season” from Trombone Shorty’s Backatown (excellent piece, great album, and yes, jamming)
• “Legend of the One Eyed Sailor” as performed by the winning Blue Devils in the 1976 DCI Championships (Siena was waving her arms pretending to play the drums during this; you can get a sense of how fun it is from the video*)
• “You Can Call Me Al” from Paul Simon’s Graceland (starring Chevy Chase in the video)

So we have modern New Orleans jazz, drum corps, and 80′s pop, and a lot of links. All excellent.

* This is not actually a great example of DCI if you are new to the phenomenon. This tune was the middle of their set in 1976, and the first piece was presumably physically taxing, so the musicians are all just standing and playing for this second song in order to rest their legs and focus on the music. My brother, some friends, and I would, in our high-school years in the late 80′s, call this type of marching performance “park and blow” (hey, we were in high school). You could get away with this kind of thing (i.e., standing for several minutes) and still win championships back in the 70′s and, if you were awesome enough like the 1988 Madison Scouts, even into the 80′s, but park and blow just won’t fly in modern DCI.

Here are the girls dancing to “Roman Carnival:”

And here is a sample of Entrain’s style of music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaOWYIBLpx4&feature=player_detailpage#t=187s

P.S. What Siena staggeringly lacks in grace and classical dancing ability she makes up for with energy and passion. Also, she knows the piece pretty well now!

That being said, Siena is a pretty fierce drummer. Sure she can bang keys on the piano too, and she can actually sing decently (as evidenced by the Donut Song), but she is probably best at banging a drumstick on some surface. Drums not technically required.

My thinking, therefore, is that even if Siena is not the best singer, keyboardist, or drummer in the world, or even necessarily pro-grade, if we nurture enough of it and she gets the right looks, for which she’s well on the way, then all she will need is to be fronted by a really stellar songwriter/guitarist/singer. So, basically, she needs to be Meg White.

This was the only version of the song that Siena knew until she started watching the Here Come The ABC’s DVD more frequently. Once you plow through the letter-related songs on that DVD, there are a handful of songs “that aren’t about letters,” including a studio version of “Robot Parade.” In this version, the full band is present, so in addition to the vocals and organ there are drums, bass, and guitar. The song is also much more lively and improvised; the band is clearly just jamming away and having fun. It should be noted that in both versions of the song, the vocals are heavily processed and always in harmony; in the video version there is only one singer and his voice is pushed through an auto-harmonizer that adds his voice higher up on every note, which makes it sound very mechanical.

No! has largely fallen out of the CD rotation, so it had been a while since Siena heard the album version of the song.

Her comment upon listening to the sparser, more vocal-oriented version in the car today:

“I don’t think They Might Be Giants are singing this. I think the robots are singing.”

Indeed, I had never interpreted the sound as being sung by the robots themselves, so now I need to go back and listen to it again with that in mind. And I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

Whenever there’s a video camera out in our house, Siena is to be found wanting to make her own movies. If she decides to go into acting, she’ll be a real challenge for her directors. Fortunately for us, today this resulted in several short and amusing takes of her dancing, getting ready to sing, or singing the alphabet song.

This first one is Siena’s own peculiar style of interpretative dance.

I included this next one of Siena and Thalia sitting down for a “picture” because it seemed very sisterly to me. Siena’s little laugh strikes me as coming from a kid older than she is.

And now the alphabet takes. In the first, I was getting snuffled by the dog. The shaking black object in the upper right is her tail, and the heavy breathing is from her nose right in my face next to the camera. And for some reason, Siena decides it’s a good idea to pull her shirt up over her face.

The following video represents a microcosm of some of our days in our household. We’ve got Siena being goofy with her shirt again, Thalia grunting, Tenzing chasing Penny in frame, Mama tidying up, and Nalia lounging.

Finally, I thought Siena’s reaction to her knocking her train over was amusing enough to include this one. Then she switches songs and ends up singing something from music class instead of TMBG. And as usual, she ends with wanting to see the take.

The existence of both a CD and a DVD of the same album poses some linguistic challenges. With Sesame Street videos, for instance, we always watch them. We don’t just listen. Ditto for the Wallace and Gromit movies. Similarly, we only ever listen to “Music Class Music,” which is on a CD. But for these two TMBG albums, there is always a choice of whether to listen to it or watch it. I should also draw a distinction regarding the videos, because some videos like the Sesame Street playlists, are watched only on a computer (we don’t have any fancy gadgets like Roku or Boxee or a TV that can stream internet video, heck our TV is a 27″ curved CRT from 1997), while others, like Wallace and Gromit and other movies, are watched on our TV.

Hence, at some point when Mama or I was asking Siena whether she wanted to listen to the CD of Here Come the ABCs or watch the DVD, the involved parental party said something along the lines of, “Do you want to listen to Here Come the ABCs or watch it as a movie?” Meaning, probably, on the TV, since Siena was largely into Sesame Street on the computer at that point.

So now, watching videos on TV for Siena is expressed with the phrase, “watch as a movie.” As in, “when we get home I want to watch Here Comes Science as a movie” and “can we watch that as a movie?”

This is one of those times when I cannot make it nearly as funny or endearing in writing as it is when she is saying it.

Since Siena was about Thalia’s age, I have been periodically playing a certain song to her and dancing with her. It started with just trying to pass some time while Mama was working late nights during vet school rotations, and I would hold on to Siena and move around during the music (she couldn’t do any moving around on her own back then). Over time, she got more into the motion, so that nowadays Siena does most of the dancing and we just hold on to her hands while she bounces around (until she says, “Let’s dance without holding hands.”).

The song? “Thunder on the Mountain” by Bob Dylan, from the album Modern Times. It was released in 2006 just before Siena was born, and I picked it up for Mo for Christmas, but I listened to it first (shhh, don’t tell her), and I liked the opening track so much that once I gave the CD to Mo, I picked up a copy for myself.

The song is an easy entree to the Dylan oeuvre, because it’s a rollicking, romping bluesy tune with a good tempo for dancing jumping up and down spasmodically, and the lyrics are pretty fun; not quite as inscrutable as some of this other tunes but non-obvious and amusing nonetheless.

Siena likes the song so much that when I started playing it for Thalia tonight (getting her indoctrinated, too) while Siena was in the bath, Siena told Mama that she could hear her favorite song and could barely be detained long enough to get dried off and dressed for bed before hustling down the hall to dance with us.

We use the Microsoft Zune software (the Zune Pass is a nice value because of the large library for streaming and the 10 free MP3 song credits that come with it per month), and for popular artists, status of which Dylan obviously qualifies, the Zune music player shows photos of the artist when their songs are playing. So Siena points at the screen as images of Dylan from various decades fade in and out and says, “Is he the one singing” or playing guitar; recently, “Is that Bob Dylan;” and tonight, when it displayed his name, “Does B O B spell Bob?” We’ll be moving her onto Highway 61 Revisited in no time.

Laughing and dancing with your kids and your wife to music of your mom’s favorite singer? Doesn’t get much better than that.

Poor Siena even sometimes gets subjected to a dinner-time performance of dad trying to conduct some raucous classical piece like Rossini’s William Tell Overture, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture, or Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture. Let’s just say it makes her laugh, and it scares our depth-perception-lacking cat. Dad should keep his day job.

The good news is that what with all this plus all the singing of the normal baby tunes that we do–and which Siena has started to do herself–she’s pretty exposed to music of many different lengths, moods, and forms. And it is amusingly rewarding for us, because she has learned that when the music stops, the piece is done: and if you enjoyed it then you cheer.

We’ll be driving home listening to the (light) classical radio station, and when a piece concludes, especially with a big symphonic sonic assault, Siena will often holler out, “yayyyyyy.” She’s even been known to clap some. There was even one time we were in the car driving back from a weekend away. Classical music was playing in the background, and mom and dad just talked right through the end of a movement. But Siena didn’t miss it: she cheered and got us both in stitches because we had missed the end of the music.

I also suspect Siena likes applause. I’ll never forget when mom had her white-coat ceremony in March of 2007, I was standing in the back of the auditorium with Siena in my arms, and whenever the applause rolled through the audience (at the end of each speech or when clapping for all the students), Siena just had a huge smile and was beaming and sometimes laughing.

So perhaps she has a career in live performance ahead of her?